"I remembered a story that Hussein, a shy and affable man in his early twenties, had told me. After his first girlfriend, Dunya, broke up with him, he’d had her portrait tattooed on his arm. “For revenge,” Hussein had said, rolling up his sleeve and revealing an elaborately detailed image. Recently, though, he’d begun saving money for a new tattoo, to cover Dunya’s portrait. He’d fallen in love with the daughter of an Army colonel, in Baghdad, and they were engaged.

When Hussein was shot, his older brother, Marwan, was down on the street, with Rayyan and the rest of the team. Marwan ran toward the house and was shot himself. Marwan survived his wounds. Hussein did not.

Souhel said that, after Hussein died, the swat team bombarded the house relentlessly until two in the morning, killing all three militants inside. Then the policemen chained the corpses to the backs of their Humvees and dragged them through the streets of Aden."

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

THE MAN ON THE OPERATING TABLE
Baynazar Mohammad Nazar was a husband and a father of four — and a patient killed during the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz. This is his story.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND STORY BY ANDREW QUILTY

"Moments after Baynazar and Samad turned to go back, gunfire erupted. Samad ran, ducking down beside a compound wall. He looked for Baynazar and saw him a few yards away, still out in the open, and watched his friend crumple to the ground.

The fighting died down quickly, allowing Samad to get to Baynazar. He’d been struck by a bullet in the thigh, and the wound was bleeding badly. With the help of a few Taliban fighters, Samad loaded Baynazar onto the back of a passing Zarang — a three-wheeled motorbike with a small flatbed — and the driver rushed the two men to the nearby MSF hospital.

Baynazar had already gone into surgery by the time Najibah arrived at the center with Khalid around noon. (Baynazar had been able to reach Samiullah, their eldest son, a tall, thin boy of 19, who then relayed the news to his mother.) He was sitting in his hospital bed, the cage-like metal and screws of an external-fixation bracket holding together the bone where the bullet had broken it apart. She stayed by his side for the rest of the afternoon; teary-eyed, she scolded him for going to the bazaar.

“Don’t cry,” Baynazar said, comforting his wife. “It’s just bad luck.” The doctors had scheduled his second surgery for the following day, and soon after he would be able to come home."

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

"As a follow-up to China’s mighty urbanization policy, I gained access to a huge construction site within a new residential development zone some 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Shanghai’s city center. My original plan was to photograph the lives of Chinese migrant workers at night. I imagined that they would probably go to some colorful places and do some interesting things after nightfall. But I was completely wrong – every day they went straight back to their dormitories, where they would eat, chat, play some poker, probably watch an outdoor movie once a month, and that’s it!"

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

"Morihisa Kanouya, then 71, had long reaped the benefits of the safety of those waves. A second-generation fisherman, he was often among the first five in the New Year’s parade because of the size of his catches. His working life was as regular as the movement of the tides. He would rise at 2am, six days a week, at his home close to the sea. Hisako, his cheery wife, would get up with him, handing him a small bento box that she had prepared before going to bed, with a snack that he would eat in the chilly darkness out at sea. He would set out with only his eldest son for company. In a few hours they would haul in anything from 50-200kg of fish, including flounder, octopus, sea bream and squid. By 7am, they would be back home in time for Hisako’s breakfast. Then from 9am, Kanouya-san (as everyone knows him) would unload his catch at the wholesale market, from where it would be trucked to Tsukiji, one of the world’s biggest fish markets, in Tokyo. By the early afternoon, he would have scrubbed his nets, and a bit later he would be tucking into his first glass of sake. A strapping, broad-chested man, he can still put away a few litres a day, he reckons. But by 8pm, he was usually home and in bed."

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

"In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of men’s courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen again—surely—if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same.
What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly, as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France and Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I could see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they should not happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I saw, and narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship would allow. After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but criticism, protest, and of the figures of loss.
The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and of all war—not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out of their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however painful, to add something to the world’s knowledge out of which men of good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years’ sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness."

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

The search began before dawn; the train had just crossed the border of Tajikistan into Uzbekistan. We were only three hours into the four-day train ride between Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, and Moscow.

An Uzbek border guard, clad in brown fatigues, boarded the train — a Soviet-replica, green, with a silver roof — and began yelling. He moved through the car, searching passenger after passenger, ripping apart belongings, interrogating everyone about terrorism and narcotics, and scanning flip phones and cheap Nokias for “sex photos” (pornography is banned in Uzbekistan). The passengers endured this, unfazed. Almost all of them were migrants traveling to Russia for work. They’d seen this routine before.

It was March. Across Tajikistan, thousands of people — mostly young men — were departing for or preparing to leave for Russia. The long Russian winter was nearing its end; construction projects in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg were slowly coming back to life.

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,
The last word Wisdom ever has to say:
He only earns his Freedom and Existence,
Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.